Sarah Hall interviews Louise Amoore on the ethical challenges of AI – The UK in a Changing Europe Podcast

In the week of the UK’s AI Safety Summit, Professor Sarah Hall talks to Professor Louise Amoore about responding to the ethical challenges posed by different types of artificial intelligence, regulatory differences between the UK and the EU and the role of tech companies in ensuring the safe use of AI.

Louise Amoore’s book Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others was published by Duke University Press in 2020.

In Cloud Ethics Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Conceptualizing algorithms as ethicopolitical entities that are entangled with the data attributes of people, Amoore outlines how algorithms give incomplete accounts of themselves, learn through relationships with human practices, and exist in the world in ways that exceed their source code. In these ways, algorithms and their relations to people cannot be understood by simply examining their code, nor can ethics be encoded into algorithms. Instead, Amoore locates the ethical responsibility of algorithms in the conditions of partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. To this end, she proposes what she calls cloud ethics—an approach to holding algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate.